Between Knowing and Feeling: Affective Transitions, Chronic Illness, and Ideal Worker Identity

This paper examines how ideal worker norms become enfleshed through affective atmospheres that organize what bodies can do, endure, and recognize as legitimate. Drawing on affect theory, disability studies, and autoethnographic analysis, I trace my shifting relationship to ideal worker identity across three periods: childhood socialization into neoliberal work ethics, early professional employment, and academic labor shaped by chronic illness and the COVID-19 pandemic. Diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in childhood, I long understood cognitively that overwork harmed my body, yet this knowledge did not translate into refusal or resistance. I argue that ideal worker norms persist not only through discourse or policy, but through affective atmospheres that shape what feels possible, defensible, and livable. Across institutional contexts, these atmospheres rendered bodily limits as personal deficits rather than legitimate grounds for refusing work demands, sustaining my complicity even amid clear awareness of harm. Engaging concepts of cruel optimism, affective atmospheres, and affective transition, I show how disidentification from the ideal worker became possible only when pandemic conditions and disability justice frameworks shifted what felt legitimate – making refusal feel reasonable rather than irresponsible. For Communication Studies, this analysis demonstrates that attending to affect is essential for explaining the gap between awareness and action. Discourse-centered approaches can be enhanced through attention to affect, helping account for why workers remain attached to norms they recognize as damaging. By tracing how affective atmospheres organize bodies at work and boundaries of legitimacy, this paper illuminates how work identities are felt into being – and how affective transitions can open space for refusing harmful expectations.